Karin Hellwig is an art historian who has collaborated as a researcher at the Zentralinstitut für Kunstgeschichte in Munich since 1983.  Her studies are centered on art theory of the early Modern Age in Spain and Italy (Die spanische Kunstliteratur im 17. Jahrhundert, 1996) and on Spanish painting of the seventeenth century (several essays on Velázquez, Murillo, and other Golden Age painters), as well as on art historiography of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (Von der Vita zur Künstlerbiographie, 2005).